Book Description

What are the effects of recent public policies for reducing educational inequalities? How do privatization and other market-based education measures influence schooling in poverty contexts and teacher training programs? In what ways, and to what extent, can these programs take responsibility for improving low-income students’ learning? How do ethnic and cultural differences relate to socioeconomic differences at school? This collection of essays serves to improve the reader’s understanding of the complex relations between education and poverty. While it does this mainly by delving into problems and challenges of the Chilean educational system, they are also currently of international concern. The chapters, authored by leading scholars in Chile and worldwide, present theoretical reflections on, and reports of, contemporary educational research on such issues as social equality, schooling in low socioeconomic sectors, and teacher education, among others. The book will be particularly helpful for scholars from different disciplines who work in education as well as for teacher educators, schoolteachers, and policy makers. More generally, it will be also of interest to anyone who wants to form justified, well-informed beliefs on the ways in which various educational and socioeconomic institutions and processes could, and do, affect each other.